thing was there, and every thing was in its place. His judgments on men, on sects, on books, had been often and carefully tested and weighed, and had then been committed, each to its proper receptacle, in the most capacious and accurately constructed memory that any human being ever possessed. It would have been strange indeed, if you had asked for any thing that was not to be found in that immense storehouse. The article which _you_required was not only there. It was ready. It was in its own proper compartment. In a moment it was brought down, unpacked, and displayed. If those who enjoyed the privilege-for privilege indeed it was--of listening to Sir James Mackintosh, had been disposed to find some fault in his conversation, they might perhaps have observed that he yielded too little to the impulse of the moment. He seemed to be recollecting, not creating. He never appeared to catch a sudden glimpse of a subject in a new light. You never saw his opinions in the making, still rude, still inconsistent, and requiring to be fashioned by thought and discussion. They came forth, like the pillars of that temple in which no sound of axes or hammers was heard, finished, rounded, and exactly suited to their places. What Mr. Charles Lamb has said with much humour and some truth, of the conversation of Scotchmen in general, was certainly true of this eminent Scotchman. He did not find, but bring. You could not cry halves to any thing that turned up while you were in his company. We have no hesitation in pronouncing this Fragment decidedly the best history now extant of the reign of James the Second. It con-. tains much new and curious information, of which excellent use has been made. The accuracy of the narrative is deserving of high admiration. We have noticed only one mistake of the smallest importance, and that, we believe, is to be laid to the charge of the editor, who has far more serious blunders to answer for. The pension of 60,000 livres, which Lord Sunderland received from France, is said to have been equivalent to 2,500l. sterling. Sir James had perhaps for a moment forgotten,his editor had certainly never heard, that a great depreciation of the French coin took place after 1688. When Sunderland was in power, the livre was worth about eighteen pence, and his pension consequently amounted to about 4,500l. This is really the only inaccuracy of the slightest moment that we have been able to discover in several attentive perusals. We are not sure that the book is not in some degree open to the charge which the idle citizen in the Spectator brought against his pudding. "Mem. too many plums, and no suet." There is perhaps too much disquisition and too little narrative; and, indeed, this is the fault into which, judging from the habits of Sir Jame's mind, we should have thought him most y to fall. What we assuredly did not ant.cipate was, that the narrative would be better executed than the disquisitions. We The intellectual and moral qualities which expected to find, and we have found, many just are most important in an historian, he possessed delineations of character, and many digresin a very high degree. He was singularly sions full of interest, such as the account mild, calm, and impartial, in his judgments of of the order of Jesuits, and of the state of men and of parties. Almost all the distin- prison discipline in England a hundred and guished writers who have treated of English fifty years ago. We expected to find, and we history are advocates. Mr. Hallam and Sir have found, many reflections breathing the James Mackintosh are alone entitled to be spirit of a calm and benignant philosophy. called judges. But the extreme austerity of But we did not, we own, expect to find that Mr. Hallam takes away something from the Sir James could tell a story as well as Voltaire pleasure of reading his learned, eloquent, and or Hume. Yet such is the fact; and if any judicious writings. He is a judge, but a hang-person doubts it, we would advise him to read ing judge, the Page or Buller of the high court the account of the events which followed the of literary justice. His black cap is in con-issuing of King James's famous declaration,stant requisition. In the long calendar of the meeting of the clergy, the violent scene at these whom he has tried, there is hardly one the Privy Council, the commitment, trial, and who has not, in spite of evidence to charac-acquittal of the bishops. The most superficial ter and recommendations to mercy, been sen- | reader must be charmed, we think, by the livetenced and left for execution. Sir James, liness of the narrative. But no person who is perhaps, erred a little on the other side. He not acquainted with that vast mass of intractaliked a maiden assize, and came away with ble materials, of which the valuable and intewhite gloves, after sitting in judgment on resting part has been extracted and condensed, batches of the most notorious offenders. He can fully appreciate the skill of the writer. had a quick eye for the redeeming parts of a Here, and indeed throughout the book, we find character, and a large toleration for the infir- many harsh and careless expressions, which mities of men exposed to strong temptations. the author would probably have removed if he But this lenity did not arise from ignorance or had lived to complete his work. But, in spite neglect of moral distinctions. Though he al- of these blemishes, we must say that we should lowed, perhaps, too much weight to every ex-find it difficult to point out, in any modern his-tenuating circumstance that could be urged in favour of the transgressor, he never disputed the authority of the law, or showed his ingenuity by refining away its enactments. On every occasion he showed himself firm wnere principles were in question, but full of charity teward individuals. torian, any passage of equal length, and at the same time of equal merit. We find in it the diligence, the accuracy, and the judgment of Hallam, united to the vivacity and the colour. ing of Southev. A history of England, written througnout in this manner, would be the mos fascinating book in the language. It would be more in request at the circulating libraries than | shock us more than this Supplement. The the last novel. Sir James was not, we think, gifted with poetical imagination. But the lower kind of imagination which is necessary to the historian, he had in large measure. It is not the business of the historian to create new worlds and to people them with new races of beings. He is to Homer and Shakspeare, to Dante and Milton, what Nollekens was to Canova, or Lawrence to Michel Angelo. The object of the historian's imagination is not within him; it is furnished from without. It is not a vision of beauty and grandeur discernible only by the eye of his own mind; but a real model which he did not make, and which he cannot alter. Yet his is not a mere mechanical imitation. The triumph of his skill is to select such parts as may produce the effect of the whole, to bring out strongly all the characteristic features, and to throw the light and shade in such a manner as may heighten the effect. This skill, as far as we can judge from the unfinished work now before us, Sir James Mackintosh possessed in an eminent degree. The style of this Fragment is weighty, manly, and unaffected. There are, as we have said, some expressions which seem to us harsh, and some which we think inaccurate. These would probably have been corrected, if Sir James had lived to superintend the publication. We ought to add that the printer has by no means done his duty. One misprint in particular is so serious as to require notice. Sir James Mackintosh has paid a high and just tribute to the genius, the integrity, and the courage of a good and great man, a distinguished ornament of English literature, a fearless champion of English liberty, Thomas Burnet, Master of the Charter-House, and author of that most eloquent and imaginative work, the Telluris Theoria Sacra. Wherever the name of this celebrated man occurs, it is printed "Bennet," both in the text and in the index. This cannot be mere negligence: it is plain that Thomas Burnet and his writings were never heard of by the gentleman who has been employed to edite this volume; and who, not content with deforming Sir James Mackintosh's text by such blunders, has prefixed to it a calumnious Memoir, has appended to it a most unworthy Continuation, and has thus succeeded in expanding the volume into one of the thickest, and debasing it into one of the worst that we ever saw. Never did we see so admirable an illustration of the old Greek proverb, which tells us that half is sometimes more than the whole. Never did we see a case in which the increase of the bulk was so evidently a diminution of the value. Why such an artist was selected to deface so fine a Torso, we cannot pretend to conjecture. We read that, when the Consul Mummius, after the_taking of Corinth, was preparing to send to Rome some works of the greatest Grecian sculptors, he told the packers that if they broke his Venus or his Apollo, he would force them to restore the limbs which should be wanting. A head by a hewer of milestones, joined to a losom by Praxiteles, would not surprise or Memoir contains much that is worth reading; for it contains many extracts from the compositions of Sir James Mackintosh. But when we pass from what the biographer has done with his scissors, to what he has done with his pen, we find nothing worthy of appro bation. Instead of confining himself to the only work which he is competent to performthat of relating facts in plain words-he fa vours us with his opinions about Lord Bacon, and about the French literature of the age of Louis XIV.; and with opinions, more absurd still, about the poetry of Homer, whom it is evident, from his criticisms, that he cannot read in the original. He affects, and for aught we know, feels something like contempt for the celebrated man whose life he has under taken to write, and whom he was incompetent to serve in the capacity even of a corrector of the press. Our readers may form a notion of the spirit in which the whole narrative is composed, from expressions which occur at the beginning. This biographer tells us that Mackintosh, on occasion of taking his medical degree at Edinburgh, "not only put off the writing of his Thesis to the last moment, but was an hour behind his time on the day of examination, and kept the Academic Senate waiting for him in full conclave." This irregularity, which no sensible professor would have thought deserving of more than a slight reprimand, is described by the biographer, after a lapse of nearly half a century, as an incredible instance "not so much of indolence as of gross negli gence and bad taste." But this is not all. Our biographer has contrived to procure a copy of the Thesis, and has sate down with his As in præsenti and his Propria quæ maribus at his side, to pick out blunders in a composition written by a youth of twenty-one, on the occasion alluded to. He finds one mistake-such a mistake as the greatest scholar might commit when in haste, and as the veriest schoolboy would detect when at leisure. He glories over this precious discovery with all the exultation of a pedagogue. "Deceived by the passive termination of the deponent verb defungor, Mackintosh misuses it in a passive sense." He is not equally fortunate in his other discovery. "Laude conspurcare," whatever he may think, is not an improper phrase. Mackintosh me ant to say that there are men whose praise is a disgrace. No person, we are sure, who has read this Memoir, will doubt that there are men whose abuse is an honour. But we must proceed to more important matters. This writer evidently wishes to impress his readers with a belief that Sir James Mackintosh, from interested motives, abandoned the doctrines of the "Vindicia Gallica." Had his statements appeared in their natural place, we should leave them to their natural fate. We would not stoop to defend Sir James Mackintosh from the attacks of fourthrate magazines and pothouse newspapers. But here his own fame is turned against him. A book, of which not one copy would ever have been bought but for his name in the title-page, is made the vehicle of the siander. Under such circumstances we cannot help exclaiming, in the words of one of the most amiable of Homer's heroes, * Νυν τις ενηειης Πατροκληος δειλαιο Μνησάσθω, πασιν γαρ επιστωτο μειλιχος είναι à aucune forme de gouvernement. Il pense que la meilleure constitution pour un peuple est celle à laquelle il est accoutumé. Le vice fondamental des théories sur les constitutions politiques, c'est de commencer par attaquer celles qui existent, et d'exciter tout au moins des inquiétudes et des jalousies de pouvoir. Une telle disposition n'est point favorable au perfectionnement des lois. La seule époque où l'on puisse entreprendre avec succès de grandes réformes de législation, est celle où les passions publiques sont calmes, et où le gouvernement jouit de la stabilité la plus grande. L'objet de M. Bentham, en cherchant dans le vice des lois la cause de la plupart des maux, a été constamment d'éloigner le plus grand de tous, le bouleversement de l'autorité, les révolutions de propriété et de pouvoir." We have no difficulty in admitting that, during the ten or twelve years which followed the appearance of the "Vindicia Gallica," the opinions of Sir James Mackintosh underwent some change. But did this change pass on him alone? Was it not common? Was it not almost universal? Was there one honest friend of liberty in Europe or in America whose ardour had not been damped, whose faith in the high destinies of mankind had not been shaken? Was there one observer to whom the French Revolution, or revolutions in general, appeared To so conservative a frame of mind had the exactly in the same light on the day when the excesses of the French Revolution brought the Bastille fell and on the day when the Girond-most uncompromising reformers of that time. ists were dragged to the scaffold—the day when And why is one person to be singled out from the Directory shipped off their principal oppo- among millions and arraigned before posterity nent for Guiana, or the day when the Legisla- as a traitor to his opinions, only because events tive Body was driven from its hall at the point produced on him the effect which they proof the bayonet? We do not speak of enthu-duced on a whole generation? This biographer siastic and light-minded people-of wits like may, for aught we know, have revelations from Sheridan, or poets like Alfieri, but of the most Heaven like Mr. Percival, or pure anticipated virtuous and intelligent practical statesmen, cognitions like the disciples of Kant. But such and of the deepest, the calmest, the most im- poor creatures as Mackintosh, Dumont, and partial political speculators of that time. What Bentham had nothing but observation and reawas the language and conduct of Lord Spen- son to guide them, and they obeyed the guidance ser, of Lord Fitzwilliam, of Mr. Grattan? What of observation and reason. How is it in phyis the tone of Dumont's Memoirs, written just sics? A traveller falls in with a fruit which at the close of the eighteenth century? What he had never before seen. He tastes it, and Tory could have spoken with greater disgust finds it sweet and refreshing. He praises it, and contempt of the French Revolution and its and resolves to introduce it into his own counauthors? Nay, this writer, a republican, and try. But in a few minutes he is taken violently the most upright and zealous of republicans, sick; he is convulsed; he is at the point of has gone so far as to say that Mr. Burke's death; no medicine gives him relief. He of work on the Revolution had saved Europe. course pronounces this delicious food a poison, The name of M. Dumont naturally suggests blames his own folly in tasting it, and cautions that of Mr. Bentham. He, we presume, was not his friends against it. After a long and violent ratting for a place; and what language did he struggle he recovers, and finds himself much hold at that time? Look at his little treatise exhausted by his sufferings, but free from some entitled "Sophismes Anarchiques." In that trea- chronic complaints which had been the torment tise he says, that the atrocities of the Revolu- of his life. He then changes his opinion again, tion were the natural consequences of the ab- and pronounces this fruit a very powerful resurd principles on which it was commenced;-medy, which ought to be employed only in exthat while the chiefs of the constituent assem-treme cases, and with great caution, but which bly gloried in the thought that they were pull-ought not to be absolutely excluded from the ing down an aristocracy, they never saw that " Pharmacopoeia." And would it not be the their doctrines tended to produce an evil a hundred times more formidable-anarchy; that the theory laid down in the "Declaration of the Rights of Man" had, in a great measure, produced the crimes of the Reign of Terror;-that none but an eye-witness could imagine the horrors of a state of society in which comments on that Declaration were put forth by men with no food in their bellies, with rags on their backs, and with arms in their hands. He praises the English Parliament for the dislike which it has always shown to abstract reasonings, and to the affirming of general principles. In M. Dumont's preface to the "Treatise on the Principles of Legislation"-a preface written under the eye of Mr. Bentham and published with his sanction--are the following still more remarkable expressions :-" M. Bentham est bien loin d'attacher une préférence exclusive height of absurdity to call such a man fickle and inconsistent because he had repeatedly altered his judgment? If he had not altered his judgment, would he have been a rational being? It was exactly the same with the French Revolution. That event was a new phenomenon in politics. Nothing that had gone before enabled any person to judge with certainty of the course which affairs might take. At first the effect was the reform of great abuses, and honest men rejoiced. Then came commotion, proscription, confiscation, the bank ruptcy, the assignats, the maximum, civil war foreign war, revolutionary tribunals, guillotin ades, noyades, fusillades. Yet a little while, and a military despotism rose out of the con fusion, and threatened the independence of every state in Europe. And yet again a litt.e while, and the old dynasty returned, followed by a train of emigrants eager to restore the old his course through those times. Exposed successively to two opposite infections, he took both in their very mildest form. The constitution of his mind was such that neither of the diseases which committed such havoc all around him could, in any serious degree, or for any great length of time, derange his intellectual health. He, like every honest and enlightened man in Europe, saw with delight the great awakening of the French nation. Yet he never, in the season of his warmest enthusiasm, proclaimed doctrines inconsistent with the safety of property and the just authori ty of governments. He, like almost every honest and enlightened man, was discouraged and perplexed by the terrible events which followed. Yet he never, in the most gloomy times, abandoned the cause of peace, of liberty, and of toleration. In that great convulsion which overset almost every other understanding, he was indeed so much shaken that he leaned sometimes in one direction and sometimes in the other; but he never lost his balance. The opinions in which he at last reposed, and to which, in spite of strong temptations, he adhered with a firm, a disinterested, an ill-requited fidelity, were a just mean between those which he had defended with a youthful ardour and with more than manly prowess against Mr. Burke; and those to which he had inclined during the darkest and saddest years in the history of modern Europe. We are much mistaken if this be the picture either of a weak or of a dishonest mind. ing Castlereagh-Pantisocratists-ultra-Tories What his political opinions were in his lat ter years is written in the annals of his country. Those annals will sufficiently refute the calumny which his biographer has ventured to pubin the very advertisement to his work. "Sir James Mackintosh," says he, "was avow. edly and emphatically a Whig of the Revo lution: and since the agitation of religious liberty and parliamentary reform became a national movement, the great transaction of 1688 has been more dispassionately, more correctly, and less highly estimated."-While we transcribe the words, our anger cools down into scorn. If they mean any thing, they must mean that the opinions of Sir James Mackintosh concerning religious liberty and parlia mentary reform went no further than those of the authors of the Revolution,-in other words, that Sir James Mackintosh opposed Catholic Emancipation, and quite approved of the old constitution of the House of Commons. The allegation is confuted by twenty volumes of parliamentary debates, nay, by innumerable passages in the very fragment which this wri ter has done his little utmost to deface. We tell him that Sir James Mackintosh has often done more for religious liberty and for parliamentary reform in a quarter of an hour than the feeble abilities of his biographer will ever effect in the whole course of a long life. --Heretics-Persecutors--breaking the old We own that nothing gives us so high an idea of the judgment and temper of Sir James Mackintosh as the manner in which he shaped The Continuation which follows Sir James Mackintosh's Fragment is as offensive as the Memoir which precedes it. We do not pretend to have read the whole, or even one half of it. Three hundred quarto pages of such matter are too much for human patience. It would be unjust to the writer not to present MACKINTOSH'S HISTORY. our readers, few of whom, we suspect, will be his readers, with a sample of his eloquence. We will treat them with a short sentence, and will engage that they shall think it long enough. Idolatry! fatal word, which has edged more swords, lighted more fires, and inhumanized more hearts, than the whole vocabulary of the passions besides." A choice style for history, we must own! This gentleman is fond of the word "vcabulary." He speaks very scornfully of Churchill's "vocabulary," and blames Burnet for the "hardihood of his vocabulary." What this last expression may mean, we do not very clearly understand. But we are quite sure that Burnet's vocabulary, with all its hardihood, would never have dared to admit such a word as "inhumanized." this omninescience,-if we may carry the "Lord Halifax played his part with deeper "Is it credible that Lord Halifax started an overture of the blackest guilt and infamy in a room with others, in a mere conversation with an inferior personage, who had little credit and no discretion, and whilst he had, it has been shown, more suitable vehicles of communication with the Prince of Orange! Such a step outrages all probability when imputed to a should Burnet invent and dramatize such a statesman noted for his finesse. But why scene? It may be accounted for by his distinctive character. He appears throughout his history a subaltern partisan, conscious of his inferiority, and struggling to convince others and himself, that he was a personage of the first pretension. Such a man, whose vanity, moreover, was notoriously unscrupulous, having heard of the intrigue of Lord Halifax, would seize and mould it to his purpose as a his history." proof of his importance, and as an episode in And this is the man who has been chosen to complete a work which Sir James Mackintosh left unfinished! Every line of the passage proves the writer to be ignorant of the most notorious facts, and unable to read characters of which the peculiarities lie most open to superficial observation. Burnet was partial, vain, credulous, and careless. But Burnet was quite incapable of framing a deliberate and circumstantial falsehood. And what reason does this writer assign for giving the lie direct to the good bishop? Absolutely none, except that Lord Halifax would not have talked on a delicate subject to so "inferior a personage." Was Burnet then considered as an insignificant man? Was it to an insignificant man that Parliament voted thanks for services rendered to the Protestant religion? Was it against an insignificant man that Dryden pu forth all his powers of invective in the mos elaborate, though not the most vigorous of his works? Was he an insignificant man who the great Bossuet constantly described, as the most formidable of all the champions of the Reformation? Was it to an insigniñcant ma |